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Playing God, the Home Game

The beginning of life, the cell stage, in the new video game Spore, in which the microbes eat pellets and avoid bigger organisms. Credit
Electronic Arts

What is the difference between a game and a toy? Does a game that feels more like a toy — even a scintillating, empowering toy — fall short on its own terms? Or is it enough just to be a great toy?

Those questions came to mind again and again as I spent more than 60 hours recently with Spore, the almost impossibly ambitious new brainchild of Will Wright. Best known for his popular evocations of urban sprawl (SimCity) and suburban Americana (The Sims), Mr. Wright has spent the last eight years trying to figure out how to convey the vast sweep of evolution from a single cell to the exploration of the galaxy as an interactive entertainment experience. His answer, Spore, is being released in stores and online for PCs and Macs in Europe on Friday and in North America this weekend.

As an intelligent romp through the sometimes contradictory realms of science, mythology, religion and hope about the universe around us, Spore both provokes and amuses. And as an agent of creativity it is a landmark. Never before have everyday people been given such extensive tools to create their digital alter ego.

Beginning with all manner of outlandish creatures — want to make a seven-legged purple cephalopod that looks like it just crawled out of somewhere between the River Styx and your brother-in-law’s basement? — and proceeding through various buildings and vehicles, Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced.

The quintessential toys, like a ball or toy soldier, captivate with their versatility. Children can see in a toy what they wish, and are content. Adults, however, tend to lose interest in toys after a little while. Instead they can find deep intellectual and sometimes emotional engagement in the games that emerge around those simple toys, like soccer and chess. Those games are eternal not because I can make my rook look like a slavering alien or because David Beckham occasionally sprouts wings, but because their basic dynamics and rules are perfectly tuned to foster an almost infinitely interesting variety of tactics, strategies and results.

Spore does not have that magic, at least not at the world-beating level it so clearly could have. People who are more interested in playing Spore than in playing with Spore — that is, people who are more interested in a game than a toy — are likely to come away feeling a bit let down.

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Spore
Whos the fittest of them all? Will Wrights evolution game
will be released in stores and online this weekend.Credit
Electronic Arts

Yes, Spore is undeniably gorgeous; Mr. Wright and his development team at Maxis have accomplished a prodigious technical feat with the programming that allows members of Spore’s interstellar menagerie variously to walk, stalk, flop and fly as they befriend and devour one another. For that matter, Mr. Wright and his publishers at Electronic Arts deserve all the credit they have received from some scientists merely for making a game about evolution (though it will be fascinating to see how the game fares among people who do not believe evolution is real). And yes, millions of people will surely spend countless hours, and dollars, on the fabulous computer toy that is Spore. And they should.

Yet like me, many players will end up crestfallen that the genius bestowed on Spore’s creative facilities was clearly not matched by similar inspiration for deeply engaging gameplay. Beneath all the eye candy, most of the basic core play dynamics in Spore are unfortunately rather thin.

At some level that seems by design. As perhaps befits its subject matter, Spore is not one game but a collection of five discrete mini-games, each reflecting a different stage of biological and social evolution and a different archetypal game style.

Life begins in the cell stage, basically a simple prologue. Think of Pac-Man but more colorful. Drifting in the primordial soup, your cell eats pellets (plants or prey) and avoids ghosts (bigger organisms). After maybe 30 minutes (if you survive), you evolve onto land and into the creature stage.

That stage is where Mr. Wright’s team seems to have spent the most effort, and for me it has been by far the most enjoyable and interesting part of the game. The entire Spore project might have been better handled if the cell and creature levels had been released together a couple years ago at a lower price (Spore now costs $49.95), allowing the more pedestrian later phases to receive a comparable level of time and attention as expansions.

Keep in mind that Spore includes no real-time multiplayer; that bizarre monster on the horizon is not being directly controlled by another player. Yet if you are connected to the Internet, that monster may have been made by another player in his own single-player universe and then used to populate your planet.

And so the creature stage rules Spore, because only there can you fully appreciate the range of expression possible using Spore’s tool set. As you explore the planet and meet other players’ progeny, the DNA you collect allows you to customize your creature with any of dozens of different body parts. Various mouths, hands, feet and wings convey different abilities, perhaps singing or dancing (for making allies of other species) or biting or clawing (for fighting).

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They then evolve into the creature stage.Credit
Electronic Arts

But Spore goes a bit off the track as it reaches the tribal phase and beyond. Perhaps the biggest problem is that all that time you spent lovingly fine-tuning your otherworldly avatar in the creature phase basically doesn’t matter anymore. After the creature phase the cosmetic appearance of your species is locked in, but the abilities it developed are largely meaningless. Instead, in the tribal stage, you get just a few choices of different weapons and clothing. In the civilization phase you devise airplanes, land vehicles and ships, and in the space phase you obviously make spacecraft. But as Spore goes along, those choices matter less and less in shaping how you can actually play the game.

Progressing out of the tribe and civilization stages requires either conquering or co-opting all the neighboring tribes or cities. These “conquer the world” stories are classic computer game styles, and Spore borrows heavily from the basic mechanics of some of the best strategy games ever made, like Command & Conquer, StarCraft and Civilization. (For example, send peasants to gather supplies while you deploy forces against your rivals.)

Once you leap to the space stage, Spore’s strategic gameplay becomes a bit of a hash reminiscent of games like Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations, only with horrendous, almost carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing interface controls and insufficient tools for managing what is meant to be a galaxy-spanning empire. The exploration and planet-shaping functions of this phase are enjoyable, but they are largely obscured by a gratuitous amount of low-level tasks like warding off pirate invasions and manually moving trade goods from one system to another, over and over. In none of its later stages does the depth of Spore’s play come close to matching the best-of-genre games available in each of the categories it derives from. (And then there are the inexplicable lapses in basic functionality, like the absence of an auto-save feature. The first time the program crashes, probably in the space phase, and you realize that hours of effort have been lost, you’ll be mad. The second time, you may quit forever.)

In fairness, one could also note a similar lack of depth in the basic play systems of The Sims, which has proven enduringly popular. But there are some intersecting design reasons why that works better in The Sims than in Spore.

Most important, The Sims is profoundly noncompetitive and open ended. The Sims is structured so you can help your family putter around the house forever. There are other families in the neighborhood to interact with, but they aren’t trying to eat your children or burn your house down.

Spore, like real life, is largely about the survival of the fittest. In each stage your species either becomes dominant and evolves, or it becomes extinct (meaning you try over and over again until you “win”). In The Sims making a family dysfunctional is half the fun. In Spore a dysfunctional species basically loses the game. That competitive nature is one reason why, despite its cutesy looks, Spore is aimed both at adults and children. And that competitive aspect is why a relative dearth of rich and interesting play mechanics hurts Spore more than The Sims.

The real frustration with Spore is that the team behind it was capable of such high achievement in the areas it focused on, while other parts languished. As reflected in its prodigious creation tools, it succeeds on so many of the most important levels for media these days. Like Facebook, YouTube and the Internet itself, Spore is about giving people both the tools to express themselves and a group to share with. The fun of trading creatures with friends and family and exploring new worlds in Spore will probably never get old.

Now if Mr. Wright and the Maxis team just take another few passes through Spore’s later stages and release a big revision patch next year, they may finally end up with a game to match the stellar toy they have already unleashed.